Quote of the Day (Ginia Bellafante, on Kate Spade’s ‘Old Loyalties and New Aspirations’)

“A Catholic schoolgirl from Kansas City, Mo., with a degree from Arizona State and a father who was in construction, Ms. Spade transcended her background in ways that are not easily possible in the most rarefied corners of Manhattan life. It is hard not to wonder what kind of toll it takes to merge past selves with present identities, to hold on to old loyalties and new aspirations. Someday Kate Spade might have told us, or maybe, in the end, she did.”— Ginia Bellafante, “Big City: The Unsustainable Toll of Being Kate Spade,” The New York Times, June 10, 2018

Robin Williams’ Art of the ‘Broken Places’

Shortly after David Letterman jumped to CBS for his own talk show, Robin Williams came on as a guest. Watching, I was chuckling away, as I’m sure thousands of others were, when the conversation took an even zanier turn, to then-tabloid sensation John Wayne Bobbitt and his beyond-infuriated wife Lorena.

“It’s amazing, when she threw it [her husband’s mutilated member] out the freeway, she didn’t land it in some toxic dump,” Williams speculated. Whereupon, jumping out of his seat, he began to enact the results: Attack of the 100-Foot Penis, featuring the short actor practically making himself several inches taller as he lifted and squared his shoulders, Boris Karloff style, stalking around the set and staring madly into the camera. (You can see the results on this YouTube video.)

The whole audience was reduced to a collective puddle of laughter, enthralled, astonished and delighted by the lightning-flash free association, the synapses jumped in a single bound by this superman of improv comics. Comedians sum up this kind of galvanic effect on listeners with a verb: killed.

That word took on an alternate, far more awful connotation this week with the news that Williams had killed himself. The act prompted an extraordinary outpouring of grief in the social media, with much of it focused on a question born of anguish: How could someone whose work involved bringing joy to millions end his life in absolute despair?

The shock was compounded by the fact that Williams’ death came when, if not at the top of his game, he seemed eminently capable of reaching it again. And so the speculation began in earnest about what drove him to these awful final moments.

“It is often easier to account for a suicide by external causes like marital or work problems, physical illness, financial stress or trouble with the law than it is to attribute it to mental illness,” wrote Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, in an op-ed this weekend for The New York Times.

It was those steep alimony payments to his ex-wives that led to his death, some people said. It was the failure last year of a sitcom, the genre that launched him to fame in 1978 with Mork and Mindy, others thought. It was survivor’s guilt over losing good friends such as John Belushi and Christopher Reeve. It was a recent diagnosis of early-onset Parkinson’s Disease.

But if the last several days have taught us anything, it is not only how little we knew about the actor, but also how little we know about others in his field plagued by this condition—indeed, how little we know, two decades after Prozac, about the best means of keeping depression at bay.

It turns out, for instance, that quite a number of stand-up comics, comic actors or directors have been affected by what has been called “the noonday demon.” We already knew that the late Rodney Dangerfield, Richard Pryor, and Williams’ biggest influence, Jonathan Winters, suffered from this affliction. In the past week, though, other comic entertainers’ similar struggles have become better known, including Carrie Fisher, Jim Carrey, Chevy Chase, Rob Reiner, Lena Dunham, David Letterman, and Luke Wilson.

Some observers have reacted viscerally to what they see as the cliché of the clown laughing on the outside but crying on the inside. An especially fierce dissent along these lines was voiced by Scott Barry Kaufman, Scientific Director of The Imagination Institute and a researcher in the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, in a blog post for Scientific American Magazine. The media should dispense with “cutesy connections to genius that are not even supported in the scientific literature,” Kaufman stated bluntly. In this regard, he found no thread between Williams’ suicide, an event “strongly influenced by mental illness,” and his comic brilliance, the product of so much more in his life: “his compassion, playfulness, divergent thinking, imagination, intelligence, affective repertoire, and unique life experiences.”

Kaufman’s impatience with the simplistic thinking in the air this last week about Williams’ death is understandable. Yet, if we cannot accept a one-circumstance-fits-all explanation for the despair experienced by Williams and other comics, certain aspects of their livelihood and environment increase their vulnerability to misfortune:

*Schedules that define their outsider status. Comics, like many entertainers, do not work nine to five like most people. Five p.m. is, in fact, early in the day for them. After a show, their natural tendency is to celebrate with other professionals well into the morning hours. Their systems now run counter to the body’s natural rhythms.

*Questioning of social norms. Comics find fodder for their work everywhere. From religion to sexuality to politics, nothing is sacred for them. The bitterness underlying such routines can be energizing—until, like an engine allowed no rest, it gives out. At that point, they feel inadequate support from the institutions (including the family) in which so many ordinary people take shelter.

*Drug use. For the last several decades, recreational drug use has been an integral part of the entertainment scene, a sign of being anti-establishment and cool. (The first decade or so of Saturday Night Live was, by common agreement, coke-fueled.) But this use, when combined with an inherent tendency toward depression, becomes especially dangerous for some users.

*A penchant for risk-taking. David Steinberg, who made many appearances on The Tonight Show in the Johnny Carson era, was quite insightful about the frequency—even necessity—for failure in his and Williams’ line of work during an interview a year and a half ago with The Huffington Post: “There is no way, and everyone will tell you this, to get better at stand-up -- that is talking for an hour in front of a live audience who are paying money to hear you -- without failing. And failure is something that takes place in front of an audience….So basically, what makes it brutal … is that you can only get better at it by failing in front of an audience. There's no way to do it at home quietly.”

*Constant craving for creative validation. Returning to the stand-up term “kill,” three words should follow it: “or be killed.” While an actor might live for applause at the end of a show, a comedian will be virtually mainlining approval, from one joke to another. The results can be devastating when the laughs don’t come as often as expected.

Kaufman, I think, is right that Williams did not suffer because of his comic genius. But Williams did feel the ground shifting beneath him because of the environment in which stand-up comics must survive.

Over the last week, a quote has reverberated in my mind to explain the nature of survival in the midst of reverses: “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

That passage comes from a crucial point in Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Three decades after writing that, at an age and under circumstances roughly similar to Williams, with a similar high status in his field, he also chose to end his life. 

At some point in a not-so-distant future, as neuroscience advances, we may well look back on the current  regimen for treating the comic as something from the Dark Ages, much like we now do with the electroshock therapy used disastrously on the Nobel Prize-winning novelist.

In the meantime, though, we will be left to mournfully wonder why these two American masters came to be destroyed by their broken places.

This Day in Literary History (Plath Commits Suicide)

Feb. 11, 1963—On her third and last suicide attempt, having carefully stuffed the pipes in her London flat so her two young children upstairs would not breathe in the fumes, 30-year-old poet Sylvia Plath stuck her head in the oven of her kitchen, turned up the gas, and died, achieving a kind of ghoulish immortality as a symbol of victimized rage.

For a long time, students of literature would have picked up on one word in that last sentence—“third”—as a mistake. 

But, if a new biography of the estranged wife of British poet Ted Hughes by Andrew Wilson is to be believed, Plath had not only tried to kill herself in August 1953—a full decade before her death—but even at age 10, two years after the death of her father.

Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted benefited from access to the obsessive record-keeping of Plath’s mother, Aurelia. While Hughes became an object of hatred to feminists for driving not merely one, but two of the women he took up with to suicide, it seems that, in Plath’s case, there already was a tendency toward self-annihilation of long standing.

I have written before about the fateful meeting between Plath and Hughes, a portent of the extreme emotions that would surface after his infidelity, their breakup and her death.  

Hughes, according to friend Al Alvarez’s account to The New Yorker’s Janet Malcolm in The Silent Woman (1993), might have been a man whom women practically threw themselves at, but he had spectacularly bad luck with the two first, principal women in his adult life: both Plath and the woman he took up with and left his wife for, Assia Wevill, killed themselves over him.

In the years after Plath’s death, Hughes, as literary executor of her estate (they had not yet divorced at the time of her passing), had his sister Olwyn, as literary agent for the estate, control access to his dead wife’s work. Despite strenuous efforts to protect his and his family’s privacy—not to mention shape perceptions of their marriage—the surviving poet’s reputation took a hit from which, in a real sense, it never really recovered.

“To the readers of her poetry and her biography, Sylvia Plath will always be young and in a rage over Hughes’ unfaithfulness,” wrote Malcolm. As for Hughes: “he has been cheated of the peace that age brings by the posthumous fame of Plath and by the public’s fascination with the story of her life.”

A few weeks ago, I stood in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey in London and noticed the proximity of Hughes’ memorial there to that of two important influences on his work: Thomas Hardy and T.S. Eliot. As it happened, all three contracted first marriages that were train wrecks, and all would be haunted to the end of their days by the breakup of these relationships.

The inscription on Hughes’ memorial in perhaps England’s most hallowed tribute to its literary geniuses hints at a kind of peace found in nature: “So we found the end of our journey, So we stood alive in the river of light, Among the creatures of light, creatures of light.” 

For Plath, however, the end of life, in “Edge,” the last poem she finished, only days before her death in one of the historically worst winters England had ever faced, the end is something infinitely more harrowing, an almost hideous art form:

“The woman is perfected,

Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment.”

 

Flashback, November 1967: Jennifer Jones’ Suicide Try

In her prime, Jennifer Jones’ affinity for high-strung, depressed women led to an Academy Award and an additional four nominations in the Forties and Fifties. 

Filmgoers did not have an inkling that she brought much of herself to these roles until November 9, 1967, when the actress--after checking into a motel and taking an overdose of pills--was found unconscious at the foot of a 400-foot cliff on Malibu Beach.

Jones survived her suicide attempt, going on to live another 32 years. But it wasn’t her first or last brush with tragedy. Headlong passion continually brought her to the brink in such films as Madame Bovary, Indiscretion of an American Wife, Duel in the Sun, and Ruby Gentry. 

Offscreen, at the height of her fame, she remained deeply private. That instinct—perhaps a mode of self-preservation—may have led her to be all-but-forgotten by Hollywood, but it also enabled her to build a new life for herself, as an advocate for mental health and patron of the arts.

What brought Jones to her desperate act? The event immediately preceding it was the news that Charles Bickford, her friend and co-star in Song of Bernadette and Duel in the Sun, had died earlier in the day.

But in all likelihood, that was simply the latest—and relatively small—blow in a series of increasing personal and professional setbacks. At age 48, she was receiving fewer and fewer film offers—and the death of her husband-Svengali, producer David O. Selznick, two years before, left her without a rudder in this difficult time. 

The producer, looking to re-enact his blockbuster Gone With the Wind success with Jones as leading lady in historic epics, drove directors as fine and varied in temperament as William Wyler, John Huston, and Charles Vidor to distraction with his micromanaging, multi-page memos, then pushed himself to the brink with all kinds of drugs, including benzedrine.

Some years ago—probably 20, 30 years after Jones’ suicide attempt--I was shocked by her appearance as a presenter on the Academy Awards. She looked matronly, heavier than the ingénue of Since You Went Away and Portrait of Jennie. It was similar to how crestfallen I felt when I saw Jones’ contemporary, Deborah Kerr, accepting an honorary Oscar a few years later.

Male stars of these actresses’ time were far less likely to register such an impact on film fans. They were allowed to continue to appear on screen, where they maintained a hold on lead roles well into their 50s, familiarizing audiences with their gradually aging faces. (Plastic surgery, Grecian Formula and toupees can only go so far.) 

In contrast to that long-time tendency for men—as well as a newer trend, in which over-40 actresses such as Annette Bening and Nicole Kidman are finding themselves with choicer parts—Hollywood executives, “so often driven by the ids of 14-year-old boys, used to usher actresses into retirement after they lit their 39th birthday candle,” recalled Rebecca Keegan of the Los Angeles Times two years ago.

Jones, living amid that era, struggled to adapt to this cruel tendency. It didn’t help that the  “women’s weepies” that made her a star had fallen out of fashion, nor that the man whose advice she had consistently followed regarding her career, Selznick, had first lost his sense of the market, then his life.

The Jones film that fascinates me the most is one that I’ve never seen in its entirety: the 1962 adaptation of Tender Is the Night. My interest stems not merely from curiosity of something unglimpsed, but also because I have long wondered how its source material, the haunting F. Scott Fitzgerald novel by that name, translated to the big screen.

Only industry insiders could have realized upon the release of this Henry King-directed film how closely its stars were enacting the fate of their characters offscreen. 

Jason Robards, as alcoholic psychotherapist Dick Diver, was well along the path of similar self-destructive drinking into the Seventies before he turned his life around. 

As for Jones, while she was too old, by nearly 20 years, for the role of Dick’s troubled wife Nicole, her offscreen personality—“clever, insecure, gentle, pathologically shy, passive aggressive,” in the words of blogger The Alphabetician—ensured that she would have had no trouble relating to the character.

Jones’ impulsivity and emotional fragility were both in evidence even early in her career, as her illicit affair with Selznick reached its climax. As her guilt mounted over the dissolution of her first marriage to actor Robert Walker, she attempted suicide. 

Yet the morning after her Oscar win for Song of Bernadette—elated as much by Selznick’s attention at the post-award party as by her victory itself—she had filed for divorce from Walker.

The actress emerged from both her early and late suicide attempts, but her daughter Mary Jennifer was not as fortunate. The girl, not even a teen when her father died, was crushed by his death, and never recovered her psychological balance. 

In 1976, while her mother was visiting her terminally ill father in Oklahoma, Mary Jennifer leaped to her death from a Los Angeles skyscraper.

Norton Simon, the billionaire art collector that the widowed Jones had married in 1971, now had something awful in common with his wife: each had lost a child to suicide. 

Following Mary Jennifer’s death, the two endowed the Jennifer Jones Simon Foundation For Mental Health And Education in 1980. In the early 1990s, she even volunteered as a counselor at the Southern California Counseling Center in Beverly Hills. Her longtime therapist Milton Wexler remarked, “Helping others helped Jennifer heal herself.” 

(Following Simon's death in the 1990s, she also became even more involved than before with endowing his major art philanthropy, the Norton Simon Museum.)

Her patronage of mental-health charities was important and welcome. Still, Jones will inevitably continue to be known for her work on film. If you’re a film buff such as myself, you’ll inevitably wonder what would have happened if she had not called it a day after The Towering Inferno in 1974.

What might be called “alternative film history”—i.e., how films might have turned out with different actors or directors—particularly fascinates me. (For instance, Emily Watson was up for the role of Laura Brown that eventually went to Julianne Moore in The Hours.) Two aborted late-life projects involving Jones especially intrigue me.

In 1981, Simon had acquired for Jones the rights to the story of headmistress-murderer Jean Harris. The role of a woman who loses everything in a desperate attempt to hold onto her lover, womanizing diet doctor Herman Tarnower, would have been made to order for the actress. 

But Ellen Burstyn’s appearance in the part in a hurriedly-made TV movie effectively killed interest in that.

The same year, Jones had acquired the rights to Larry McMurtry’s novel Terms of Endearment, but she withdrew after writer-director James L. Brooks did something that Selznick would rarely if ever tell his wife: i.e., that she was too old for the part. She withdrew, and it must have galled her a couple of years later when Shirley MacLaine won the role--and, ultimately, an Oscar--for it.

The life and career of Jones pose a number of questions: Would she have been discovered without Selznick? Would her career have taken its drastic downturn after A Farewell to Arms and Tender Is the Night without his constant interference with directors? Would she have become a cult figure if she had died rather than lived following her 1967 suicide attempt?

(The photo accompanying this post comes from 1945, at the height of her youthful beauty, in the melodrama Love Letters.)